The Galaxy S26 is a photography nightmare

On The Vergecast: Another “what is a photo?” apocalypse, the uncertain future of Xbox, and Claude’s consciousness.

by David Pierce

Feb 27, 2026, 3:15 PM UTC

David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

In many ways, Samsung’s new phones are fairly normal upgrades. The S26 lines come with some useful new things — particularly the Privacy Display on the S26 Ultra, which looks like an extremely cool bit of tech and a really useful new feature — and a lot of iterative year-over-year changes. The new camera features, on the other hand, are neither of those things. They’re something worse. Something scarier.

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On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David discuss the new phones, then dive into the ways in which the S26’s AI camera features seem to be clearly designed to change the whole idea of what happens when you try to take a picture. For that matter, it’s not even clear that what you’re taking is a “picture” anymore. We’ve been talking about the “What is a photo?” apocalypse for some time, and the S26 feels like a crossing of a line. All in the service of some cupcakes.

After that, the hosts turn to the big shakeup inside the Xbox team. With Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond out, and Asha Sharma in, it’s time to wonder what happened to the Xbox, and whether Sharma or anyone can fix it. Microsoft’s gaming problems have been around for years and are the result of a string of bad bets and bad decisions. What would it take to get back on course, and is “back on course” even possible anymore?

Finally, in the lightning round, we do another round of Brendan Carr is a Dummy, debate a truly astonishing chart, check in on OpenAI’s infrastructure spending, and decide once and for all whether Claude is alive. Or, at least, whether Anthropic thinks so.